Streaming services aren’t just competing for subscribers anymore. They’re competing for repetition.
The goal now is frequency—not how many users sign up, but how often they come back, how quickly they find what they’re looking for, and how easily they stay. Last week wasn’t about content. It was about habit.
Netflix ran a small test surfacing expiring titles in a new “Last Chance to Watch” row. Not revolutionary, but strategic. It’s a subtle prompt that creates urgency and nudges session starts. Combined with natural language search and the rollout of TV-based party games, the direction is clear: get users into the service more often, keep them there longer, and make every interaction easier to repeat.
Discovery Is the New UI. And AI Is the New Showrunner
Netflix is not building a better home screen; it did that earlier this year. Now, it’s building a faster path to the next play. Its AI-powered natural language search( quietly in testing) is designed around intent, not inventory. Users describe what they feel like watching, and the service delivers what fits. No genre filters. No browsing rabbit holes.
This is not new for product-mature companies. It’s just getting more precise. Discovery is being redefined as velocity: how quickly can you get someone to something they’ll finish?
It’s a shift that goes deeper than features. It’s reshaping the product stack around daily use rather than monthly retention.
MAUs Are Dead. But Frequency Is Everything
Nearly every major streaming service has stopped reporting subscriber numbers. And thankfully, monthly active user counts have finally died off as an external success metric.
But don’t confuse silence with complacency.
Internally, product-first services are now optimizing for something else entirely: weekly actives, daily actives, session starts, and session recovery. They’ve actually been doing that.
This is the real scoreboard now. If users aren’t coming back regularly, the service is broken. If they are, it’s working, regardless of what the public metrics say.
Streaming or OTT has always been about watching what you want, where and how you want. But now, the best services are learning how you watch what you want and designing around that.
At this point, everyone’s finally realized that time on service is the KPI. Everything else is noise.
FAST Is Scaling. But It’s Still Sloppy
FAST is still growing in channel count and ad inventory, but the experience remains shallow. Discovery is weak. Metadata is missing. And content differentiation is thin. While services chase breadth, they’re undermining their own value.
Compare that to the discipline being shown elsewhere. Product-forward services are refining their recommendation engines, their interfaces, and even the psychology of navigation. It’s not about adding content. It’s about adding reasons to return.
TV Gaming Is Just More Time In-App
This week, Netflix introduced casual party games like Boggle and Pictionary into its TV app. It’s not trying to compete with consoles. It’s using gaming to expand what time on service can look like.
You Don’t Know Jack and Jackbox built a multi-million-user business by doing the exact same thing, turning the TV into a game-night engine with just phones and friends. Netflix is taking that same energy and baking it into its core service. No downloads. No added costs. Just more reasons to stay logged in.
The Streaming Wars Take
This is where streaming is headed. Not into bigger bundles or louder franchises. Into quieter features that drive habit and reduce friction.
- A row that makes you click before content disappears
- A search bar that acts like a conversation
- A game that keeps you in the app after the credits roll
And the smart players are no longer chasing subscribers. They are chasing behavior. That’s why the idea of buying a company like Warner Bros. Discovery doesn’t even register anymore. As Greg Peters made clear, services win by building, not buying.
Let’s Be Clear
Yes, I’ve poked fun at legacy media. The hubris earned it. But not everyone in that world is out of touch.
There are people who absolutely get it. Matt Strauss is one. He’s not just thinking about programming. He’s aligning teams around frequency. He understands that UX isn’t just design polish, it’s an output of organizational intent.
And Skip Buffering? Same deal. He’s always understood early that streaming wouldn’t be won by launch dates and tentpoles, it would be won by behavior. And he’s always treated product like strategy, not just support.
That kind of thinking is rare. But it’s exactly what this next phase of streaming demands.
Zoom Out
If someone opens the app every day, finds something fast, and finishes it, the service is working. That’s it. That’s the metric. And every move this week, whether it looked like gaming, search, or discovery, was pointed at that outcome.
Because while content is expected, context is the differentiator. And frequency is the business.
